Chris writes in with the MAKE inspired TV repair on his 47″ Panasonic HDTV (model: PT-47W53G) –
“I think that if I hadn’t been reading Make magazine and the Make blog every day, I wouldn’t have attempted this. I have their t-shirt that says “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it”, so I figured it was my duty to give it a try and I’m glad I did.
First of all, I’d like to commend www.electronix.com. I ordered my replacement parts on Monday with two day shipping, but it was late in the day and I knew the order wouldn’t ship until Tuesday, so with the holiday, I didn’t expect the parts until Friday. They arrived Wednesday afternoon, so Wednesday evening, I was ready to begin. First I made a trip to Radio Shack to buy a new soldering iron and a desoldering bulb (my old iron was a bit crusty, so I bought a dual heat one with a stand since I would be working on the carpeted floor)…” – Part II & part I.
Chris saved over $430 doing this himself!
6 thoughts on “Fixing your own TV”
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I would REALLY recommend checking the associated low-ohm output resistors and the digital convergence unit before replacing the STK chips. You replace the STKs alone, and they’ll work for a while, sure…but then they’ll fail, and you’ll pull down the 28v line on your power supply and blow it up. Then you’ll pay $600 for your repair.
The resistors, at least the ones close by and connected to the amp pins, seemed to test OK. I had heard one other forums that sometimes the resistors would cause the STKs to fail, or that a failed STK would often blow the resistors. Someone said they didn’t replace a bad resistor and it blew their new amp chip, but I assumed that was a “I turned it on and it blew again” type failure.
I’ll look into getting a replacement set of resistors and replacing them pre-emptively.
hey i have a sony kp-57hw40. convergence was way off. so i purchased a referbished d board from sony, installed board checked my connections then powered it up. When i powered it up the blue tube flickered a bit. Now when i enter the pje engine mode i still can’t get the convergence lines to move. Did the tube screw up a new board?